Facebook Charging $100 For The Pleasure Of Sending Mark Zuckerberg A Message

Well, here's an an amusing little side dish for a Friday morning. It seems Facebook is charging people $100 to send Mark Zuckerberg a message. Is this the firm's latest idea for a revenue stream, or is this, as a spokesperson claimed, an experiment in spam filtering? According to Mashable, anyone who isn't a friend of the Facebook founder gets a little blue box marked, "Send to Inbox for $100.00"—and this was tried from multiple accounts. When Fast Company attempted it, however, no such box appeared.

Mashable quoted a statement from Facebook's press people about the $100 query: "We are testing some extreme price points to see what works to filter spam." What your $100 will do for you, apparently, is to make sure your message doesn't go straight to Facebook's Other Inbox, a receptacle for stuff sent to you by people who aren't your friends—spammers, stalkers, your crazy aunt, and so on and so forth. Last month, Facebook introduced pay-to-message testing, a variation on last year's paid post experiment.

Might I make a suggestion? If you want to ask Zuck something and you're getting the $100 payment box, wait until he goes on Reddit's's AMA.

My writing career has taken me all round the houses over the past decade and a half--from grumpy teens and hungover rock bands in the UK, where I was born, via celebrity interviews, health, tech and f…